Tessa Boase

The untold story of two women who fought for change in a male-dominated Victorian society deeply resistant to change. Meet two very different heroines: Mrs Pankhurst and Mrs Lemon – one lionised, the other forgotten – and their rival, overlapping campaigns, one for women's suffrage and one – known as 'Mother of the Birds' – against the plumage trade. Moving from Manchester to London; from the feather workers’ slums to the highest courtly circles; from the first female political march to the first forcible feeding – Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather takes the reader on a novel journey through Victorian and Edwardian Britain to the First World War and beyond.

Tessa Boase read English at Oxford, and has worked as a scriptwriter, a voiceover artist and an editor at The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail. As a freelance journalist she has contributed to a wide variety of publications. Her first book, The Housekeeper’s Tale, was published in 2014.